Article

"Being Muslim in Soviet Central Asia, or an Alternative History of Muslim Modernity"

Adeeb Khalid
Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du
Canada, vol. 18, n° 2, 2007, p. 123-143.

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Being Muslim in Soviet Central Asia, or an
Alternative History of Muslim Modernity
ADEEB KHALID

Abstract
The literature on Muslim modernity takes little account of the experience of the
Muslim societies of the Soviet Union, even though they might have undergone
some of the most radical transitions to modernity. The Soviet sought a different
kind of modernity, one without markets and liberalism, and one with little place
for religion in it. I argue that the Soviet project succeeded to a great extent. This
article explores some of the implications for our understanding of Muslim
modernity if we are to take the experience of Soviet Muslim societies seriously.

Résumé
La documentation relative à la modernité musulmane ne tient que très peu
compte de l’expérience des sociétés musulmanes de l’Union soviétique, même
si elles ont connu les transitions vers la modernité parmi les plus radicales qui
soient. Les Soviétiques ont cherché une modernité différente, sans marchés ni
libéralisme, laissant peu de place à la religion. Je fais valoir que le projet
soviétique a réussi dans une large mesure. Cet article explore certaines des
implications liées à notre compréhension de la modernité islamique si nous
considérons sérieusement l’expérience des sociétés musulmanes soviétiques.

I n the decade and a half before the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the major
preoccupations of Soviet watchers in the West was to wonder about the future
demographic composition of the Soviet population. More precisely, the ques-
tion that drove these projections related to the rising proportion of the Soviet
population that would be Muslim.1 Analysts debated what this shift would
entail for the stability of the regime and, more concretely, for the functioning of

1 See, for example, Murray Feschbach, “The Soviet Union: Population Trends and Dilemmas,”
Population Bulletin 37, no. 3, (1982): 1-44; idem, “Trends in the Soviet Muslim Population:
Demographic Aspects,” in The USSR and the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign
Policy, ed.Yaacov Ro’I (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 63-94; William Fierman and
Martha Brill Olcott, “The Challenge of Integration: Soviet Nationality Policy and the Muslim
Conscript,” Soviet Union 14, no. 1 (1987): 65-101.

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the conscription-based Soviet army. The assumption, seldom stated explicitly,

was that Soviet Muslims remained Muslims, their political behaviour subject to
their Muslimness and immune to their Sovietness, and indeed immutable in
general.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing war there brought this
question to the forefront. Several books discussed the threat Islam and Muslims
could pose to the Soviet state.2 Rumours, completely unsubstantiated but
influential, circulated that the Soviet army was not sending Muslim soldiers to
Afghanistan,3 and the Central Intelligence Agency thought that Muslims “could
do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union.”4 (It was, of course, the 1980s, and
Muslims who posed threats to the Soviet Union were a good thing.) The Soviet
Union collapsed without its Muslim population playing any significant role in
its demise. Indeed, in 1991, in the last year of its existence, support for the
continued existence of the USSR was nowhere higher than in the Muslim-
majority republics of Central Asia.5 Central Asians proved to be the most
Soviet of all Soviet citizens.
Today we know better, not only because we have the illicit luxury of
hindsight on our side, but also because we can question some of the highly
problematic assumptions about both Islam and Soviet life that underlay the
prognostications of the late-Soviet period. The Muslims of the Soviet Union
were the “forgotten Muslims” of the world,6 and it was very easy to think about
them in abstractions. The Soviet Union is no more, and along with hindsight
has come unprecedented access to the lands it controlled and to the sources for
their history. The histories of the various Muslim groups of the USSR have
been (and are being) rewritten, and many of our assumptions about them have
been revised. My paper is part of this endeavour. I want to present a history of
Muslims in the Soviet Central Asia (where the majority of the Soviet Union’s
Muslims lived), free of essentialist assumptions about Islam and Communism.

2 Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup, The Islamic Threat to the Soviet Union (London:
Croom Helm, 1983); Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1985); Michael Rywkin, Moscow’s Muslim
Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (London: Hurst,1982); Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, L’Empire
éclaté: la révolte des nations en URSS (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).
3 The rumours made it all the way into a research note prepared by the Rand Corporation: S.
Enders Wimbush and Alex Alexiev, Soviet Central Asian Soldiers in Afghanistan (Santa
Monica, CA.: Rand Corp., 1982).
4 CIA director William Casey, quoted by Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA,
Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York:
Penguin, 2004), 104-05.
5 Adeeb Khalid, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2007), 129.
6 Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Les Musulmans oubliés: l’islam en
URSS aujourd’hui (Paris: François Maspero, 1981).

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OF MUSLIM MODERNITY

Considered thus, this history can also help rethink our understanding of broader
questions of global or world history of the twentieth century.
The Muslim societies of Central Asia have been an integral part of the
Islamic world for centuries.7 Islam came to Central Asia in the eighth century,
and the oasis cities of Transoxiana had become tied into the networks of the
broader Islamic world by the tenth century of the common era. Over the
centuries, Transoxiana produced any number of figures of central importance to
the Islamic tradition. It was only in the twentieth century that the Muslims of
Central Asia were “forgotten,” both by other Muslims and — more importantly
for the present argument — by those who study Muslim societies. The Muslims
of Central Asia might number over 50 million and might represent some of the
oldest Muslim societies in the world; they might have undergone some of the
most radical transitions to modernity; but they play almost no role in our broad
generalizations about Islam or Muslim societies in the modern world, and their
experience in no way informs our understanding of the Muslim world’s
encounter with modernity.
The usual narrative of the modern Muslim world begins with the rise of
modernist movements in the nineteenth century, both among intellectuals and
among state elites where such were left intact (mostly the Ottoman Empire and
Iran), but this narrative centres on the establishment of national states after
World War I, and especially in the period of decolonization after World War II.
Through the creation of new internal markets, of systems of public education,
the new national states garnered new forms of political organization, new forms
of solidarity based on new identities and new kinds of civic and ethnic
commitments. The middle decades of the twentieth century saw massive state-
and nation-building projects in a number of Muslim states, as a result of which

7 The term “Central Asia” has no fixed referent in the contemporary geographic imagination. It
coexists with other markers, such as Inner Asia, Eurasia, or Central Eurasia. With the excep-
tion of the last, these terms have a long history, but they have acquired new visibility in the
aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which both ended the utility of the term
“Soviet,” and made it possible to think or rethink space in new ways. Yet, fifteen years later,
there is no consensus on terminology, and no clear demarcation of the region. Now that
Afghanistan is back in the news, it is often classified as Central Asia for reasons of geograph-
ical proximity. Indeed, confusion is heightened by a semantic shift in Russian in this regard.
Soviet usage distinguished Sredniaia Aziia, literally “Middle Asia,” which referred only to the
four Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Türkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from
Tsentral’naia Aziia, “Central Asia,” which included Xinjiang, Mongolia, and (more or less)
Kazakhstan. In post-Soviet times, Russian-language usage has shifted rapidly, and under the
influence of English, Tsentral’naia Aziia has emerged as the sole term in current use. I use the
term “Central Asia” to denote Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan, the five countries that emerged as sovereign states from the collapse of the Soviet
Union. It is the experience of the Soviet past that demarcates the region as one (and quite dif-
ferent from its neighbours to the south). The closest parallels exist with other Muslim-majority
regions of the former Soviet Union and with Xinjiang in the People’s Republic of China.

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the idea of the territorial nation-state became part of the common sense of
modern Muslim life. Although many of the nation-states in the Muslim world
sought to restrain the market and pursued étatiste programmes, they
nevertheless existed in a wider world order defined by capitalism and markets.8
The last third of the twentieth century saw a rise of Islam as a political
force, as new understandings of Islam encroached on a political field that had
in many places been monopolized by state-centred nationalism or patriotism. A
number of scholars have pointed out how this new potency of Islam as a
political force is in no way a return to the past, but a result of new developments
in the Muslim world. Although some Islamist movements espouse a vaguely
pan-Islamic rhetoric, the new Islamist politics is very much a creation of the
twentieth century. It exists in the political terrain created by the nation-state and
is inconceivable without it.9 Nevertheless, the rise of Islam as a potent force has
called attention to the tensions generated in the Muslim world by modernity in
its liberal guise, with many seeking the answer in essentialist theories of clash
of civilizations that posit an innate inability on the part of Muslims to become
modern. The rise of Islamism is seen as a “failure” of modernity in the Muslim
world, a failure brought about by certain essential characteristics inherent in
Islam itself.10
This basic narrative of the rise of modern forms of state and economic
power and their repercussions works quite well for most of the Middle East and
North Africa, and maybe even for South and Southeast Asia. Yet it is
problematic to gloss it (as it often is) as the dominant experience of the Muslim
world. Such a narrative has little bearing for the Muslim communities of the
former Russian empire, which experienced the twentieth century in a radically
different form. They found themselves at the centre of a massive project to
achieve a different kind of modernity, one without markets and liberalism, and
one which had little place for Islam — or any other religion — in it. I argue that
the Soviet project succeeded to a great extent. My goal in this paper is to
examine the ways in which Soviet modernity transformed Muslim societies. I
will speak of Central Asia (and even more specifically, of Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan, the heirs to the sedentary oasis-based civilization of Transoxiana),

8 For general academic surveys of the topic, see: James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-
States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History
of the Islamic World, trans. Azizeh Azodi (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
9 See, for example, Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 2nd ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004); Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds., New Media
in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University
Press, 2003); M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
10 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle
East (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).

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OF MUSLIM MODERNITY

although much of what I say applies to other Muslim societies of the former
Soviet Union, such as those of Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chechnya,
and Daghestan.

MUSLIMS IN SOVIET MODERNITY

The Soviet project aimed at the total transformation of society, to achieve a
socialist modernity — one that would surpass in results the bourgeois
modernity that had given rise to socialism and have higher moral credentials.
These lofty ideals gave the party-state license to undertake highly coercive
measures to hurry along the “wheel of history,” but they also meant that the
Soviet Union was, first and foremost, a developmentalist state that judged itself
by its own modernizing agenda. It was this last that won it considerable
legitimacy both among its own population and in the decolonizing world at
large.

Radical Social Transformation and Cultural Revolution

In Central Asia, the Communist Party’s agenda for social and cultural transfor-
mation captured the imagination of local modernist intellectuals who had
articulated a vision of change for their society that was rooted firmly in transna-
tional Muslim discourses of modernity.11 The Russian revolution coincided
with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the last Muslim power to have survived
into the modern world. The Ottoman defeat produced a sense of desperation
among Muslim intellectuals throughout the world, and pushed them in the
direction of a more radical critique of bourgeois modernity that for them was
synonymous with colonialism. The Bolsheviks claimed anti-colonial creden-
tials for themselves and spoke incessantly in the early years of “setting the East
ablaze,” of fomenting an anti-colonial revolution that would lead to the libera-
tion of “the East,” including the Muslim world, from colonialism. Indeed, the
Russian revolution was the moment of the birth of “Third-Worldism,” and
Russian Muslims played a key part in it.12 Anti-colonialism and the promise of
rapid, radical change drew modernist intellectuals to Soviet rule in Central
Asia.
Modernist Islamic reform had come to Central Asia at the turn of the twen-
tieth century, and was known locally as Jadidism. While it was rooted in
debates over the relationship between the Islamic tradition and the modern

11 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1998).
12 Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultan Galiev. Le père de la révolu-
tion tiers-mondiste (Paris: Fayard, 1986); see also Adeeb Khalid, “The Fascination of
Revolution: Central Asian Intellectuals, 1917-1924,” in Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central
Eurasia, ed. Tomohiko Uyama (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2007), 137-52.

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world that raged all over the Muslim world, Jadidism nevertheless had local
specificities. It began in the late nineteenth century with a critique of traditional
Muslim education and culminated in the advocacy of a far-ranging transforma-
tion of many aspects of communal life. The key concepts in Jadidism were
“civilization” (madaniyat) and “progress” (taraqqiy), which the Jadids assimi-
lated into their understanding of Islam to produce a vigorously modernist
interpretation of Islam, in which the achievement of “civilization” (always in
the singular) came to be seen as the religious obligation of all Muslims.13
The Russian revolution opened up a new world of possibilities for the
Jadids. Until then, Jadidism had been limited to the reform of traditional
schools and exhorting the Muslim community to heed the call for reform. After
the revolution the Jadids hoped to lead change through the mechanisms of the
state. The Bolsheviks who took power at the centre had an agenda of radical
social and cultural transformation of their own, and for much of the 1920s, the
Jadids and the Bolsheviks found areas where they could cooperate, however
uncomfortably.
The 1920s were, therefore, years of great enthusiasm for the Jadids. In
Bukhara, they found themselves at the helm of an ostensibly independent state,
the People’s Soviet Republic of Bukhara. They embarked on a program of
national and cultural reform that dated from before the revolution. They set out
to reform the maktabs and the madrasas and to systematize them in a network
of public education. The ulama had been the main source of hostility to the
Young Bukharans before 1920, and many of them suffered in the aftermath of
the “revolution.” Some were executed (old accounts had to be settled), and
many went into exile in Afghanistan. Others supported the uprising in the
mountainous regions of eastern Bukhara (present-day Tajikistan) against the
Bukharan republic. But several reformist figures and notables threw their sup-
port behind the new government. During its brief existence, the Bukharan
government tried to organize “progressive” ulama around this core, holding
congresses (very much on the revolutionary pattern in vogue since 1917) to
express support for reforming Islam, for the policies the government, and
against international imperialism. The Young Bukharans also nationalized the
large amount of property held as waqf, the Islamic institution of pious endow-
ments. They tried to establish a system of public health, and sought to establish
a national economy. The model for the Young Bukharans came not from Marx,
but from modernist Muslim notions of change, especially those that had been
developed in the late Ottoman empire. The years of the Bukharan republic coin-
cided with the establishment of the Turkish Republic, and the two projects had
much in common. This was not what the Bolsheviks had in mind, though, and

13 One of the main arguments of Adeeb Khalid in The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform:
Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1998).

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OF MUSLIM MODERNITY

they squeezed out the most “nationalist” members of the government by mid-
1923.
In Turkestan, which was part of Soviet Russia, few Jadids got close to
political power. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks were keen to attract members of
the indigenous population into their ranks, and the earliest years of the new
regime saw a substantial influx on Muslims into the party. Many Jadids joined
up, but they were upstaged by a different group of Muslims — those with
Russian educations, who could function much more effortlessly in Russian than
the Jadids. Many of them were Kazakhs from Semirech’e province, then part
of Turkestan. The most prominent indigenous political figure in the early years
of Soviet rule was Turar Rysqulov (1894-1938), a Kazakh who had attended a
so-called Russian-native school (schools run by the Tsarist government that
provided basic literacy in Russian alongside the basic tenets of Islam) before
attending a school of agronomy in Pishpek (now Bishkek). He was not a Jadid
because he had no previous connection to the reform of education or culture.
His path to politics was quite direct. During the revolution, he became politi-
cally active, and emerged in 1919 as the chairman of the “Muslim Bureau” of
the local Communist party, an office that was supposed to work for the inclu-
sion of the Muslim population of the region into the Party. By the end of the
year he had become chair of the central executive committee of Soviet
Turkestan, the highest office in the executive branch of regional government
under the new regime. To be sure, the executive authority of Soviet Turkestan
was subordinate to the centre, but Rysqulov was the first of many natives to
head regional government. His passion was the revolutionary mobilization of
the local population with the aim of achieving economic and political equality
with Russians within the new Soviet state, and working towards a world revo-
lution that would liberate the colonial world from European rule. His
enthusiasm for anti-colonial revolution led him on occasion even to criticize
Lenin for his lack of zeal in the matter.14 Rysqulov was succeeded by a series
of other figures from similar backgrounds, men comfortable with Russian and
in the intrigues of power, but with few roots in Muslim reform.
The Jadids, however, dominated the cultural realm for much of the decade,
during which they worked to create a new national culture and cultural iden-
tity. What allowed the Jadids to do all this was the Soviet regime’s commitment
to overcoming backwardness and revolutionizing culture. The state was to play
a central role in the matter of culture. If the Tsarist regime had shied away from
substantial intervention in local society, the Bolsheviks were the very opposite.
It was the state’s revolutionary goal to “build culture.” The state provided funds
for the opening of new schools, the publication of newspapers, magazines, and
books, and even for theatre. The Soviets also sought to “indigenize” their

14 T. R. Ryskulov, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Almaty: Qazaqstan 1998), 3:182-7.

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regime in order to overcome the distrust of the indigenous population towards

them as outsiders. As early as 1918, they declared Uzbek the official language
of Turkestan alongside Russian (by 1921 Turkmen and Kazakh had also been
elevated to this status). Although Russian continued to dominate until the end
of the Soviet period, this official recognition was important. If nothing else, it
opened up the necessity of reforming local languages and modernizing their
vocabulary. The Soviets also sponsored large-scale ethnographic “exploration”
on the assumption that the land and its people had to be better understood if
they were to be incorporated into the new regime. All of this opened up vast
arenas of cultural work into which the Jadids stepped with gusto.
The Jadids also poured a great deal of energy into the creation of modern
schools. The first state-run schools for the indigenous population were new-
method schools of Jadid provenance, which were taken over by local soviets
(councils) and turned into Soviet schools. Teachers from Jadid schools pro-
vided the bulk of the workforce in early Soviet schools, and early primers and
textbooks bore a clear Jadid imprint in terms of content, style, and subject.
For their part, the Bolsheviks made several concessions in the early 1920s
to win the trust of the local population. During the civil war, the local Soviet
government had “nationalized” all waqf property, and turned over agricultural
lands to the peasants who worked on them. This was partially revoked in 1922,
when non-agricultural waqf properties were returned to the mosques or
madrasas that benefitted from them. (Agricultural waqf property remained
under the use of those who worked it.) But this was not a return to the pre-rev-
olutionary status quo. Waqf property was to be overseen by local waqf sections
subordinate to a central waqf administration in Tashkent. Waqf was thus
bureaucratized and brought within the purview of the state. This was a reform
that the Jadids had long advocated, and that their counterparts in Bukhara had
also put into practice. Waqfs, they argued, had always been meant for educa-
tional purposes, and it was the community’s obligation to take them over the
progress of national culture. For much of the decade, the central waqf adminis-
tration, run by Muslims, presented itself as an agent of progress and reform, an
institutional arm of society helping with the upkeep of mosques and funding the
fledgling network of modern schools.
Changing the position of women was another area where Bolshevik aims
found resonance among the Jadids, who had long argued that the progress of
Islam and the nation required that women be educated and that they take an
active part in public life. After the revolution, the Jadids emerged as major pro-
ponents of changing women’s position in Muslim society. Their main concerns
were with education, marriage at very young ages, polygyny, and, increasingly,
unveiling.
Among the sedentary populations of Central Asia — in Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan — women’s seclusion was a basic fact of the social order, connected

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OF MUSLIM MODERNITY

as it was with concepts of honour, shame, respect, and hierarchy. It was marked
by a dress code that required women, when outside the house, to wear a heavy
cotton robe that came down to the ankles (paranji) and a veil of woven horse-
hair (chachvon) that completely covered the face. In the period of Russian rule,
the wearing of this combination seems to have become nearly universal among
the sedentary population of Central Asia, to the point where the Bolsheviks saw
wearing the paranji-chachvon as defining what it meant to be an Uzbek woman.
For both the Jadids and the Bolsheviks, the paranji-chachvon was a hazard to
women’s health, in addition to being both the symbol and the means of their
oppression and degradation. During the early 1920s, there were cases of
women abandoning the veil and appearing in public places (including the the-
atre), but most women who worked, and even those engaged in political work,
continued to wear the paranji-chachvon.
The turn to open intervention in local society in mid-1926 also meant a
change in the Bolshevik policy on the question of women. That is, the libera-
tion of women had to be accomplished in the same revolutionary way as the
abolition of religion, and it was to be equated with unveiling. The campaign
against the veil was nothing less than a hujum, assault. On 8 March 1927, inter-
national women’s day and the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Russian
revolution, the Zhenotdel organized a series of mass meetings in which thou-
sands of women cast off their veils and, in many cases, burned them. Such
meetings continued for the next two years, but, unlike other campaigns of the
cultural revolution, the hujum was called off in 1929. It had produced a mas-
sive backlash and was turning out to be counterproductive in every way. The
paranji did not disappear until the 1950s.15
The 1920s also saw radical cultural transformation in Turkey and Iran,
wrought by authoritarian regimes in pursuit of modernization, and in part at
least driven by the same desperation that drove the Jadids. Although we have
long since lost the comparative perspective on these transformative projects, it
is worth remembering that at the time, these various projects were seen by their
Muslim proponents as broadly similar, as part of a similar process of “awaken-
ing” and modernizing the Muslim world.

15 Much has been written on the hujum in recent years. Douglas T. Northrop, Veiled Empire:
Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pre-
sents a relentlessly negative view of the hujum, which he sees as a case of imperial
intervention into a pristine national community. Marianne R. Kamp, The New Woman in
Central Asia: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2007), offers a different account of the hujum which takes seriously the
longer term development of Muslim debates on the question and the aspirations of women
activists themselves.

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Disestablishing Islam
It was on the matter of religion that the Bolsheviks and indigenous reformers
had the greatest differences. The Jadid programme was based on the
modernization of faith; the Bolsheviks had absolutely no need of faith. Religion
might be the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and
the soul of soulless conditions,” as Marx had written, but it was, ultimately, “the
opium of the people,” for which there was no need left in the brave new world
of Communism. For the Bolsheviks, the irrationality of religion coincided
neatly with its anti-revolutionary and exploitative essence, and it had to be
rooted out.
By mid-1926 party authorities in the region felt ready to launch an assault
on traditional society. It was ferocious and destructive, though it began
modestly enough, with Uzbekistan’s people’s commissariats of justice and
education beginning to shut down all unofficial schools. During the course of
the following academic year, all old-method schools and madrasas were closed.
Qazi courts were similarly and quickly suppressed. With its beneficiaries gone,
the waqf administration was abolished and all property controlled by it
nationalized; the religious boards were abolished by 1928. Along with schools
and courts went the mosques. A few mosques had been closed earlier in the
decade and their buildings given over to “socially useful” purposes, but the
years between 1927 and 1929 saw a sustained campaign of closures and
destruction directed against them. The closures were assigned either to the
political police or to revolutionary troikas, three-member teams of (often self-
appointed) officials that went around with the authority to close down schools
or mosques and confiscate their property. Members of the Komsomol, the youth
wing of the Communist Party, and of the Union of Militant Godless were
prominent in this movement. The campaign against mosques tended to run out
of control. Indeed, as Shoshana Keller has noted, the situation was so chaotic
that there is hardly any documentation to be found in the archives until 1929.16
Overall, we have better accounts of the destruction visited upon Islam in
Central Asia by Genghis Khan than by the Soviets. There are no credible
statistical data for mosques either, but the evidence of destruction was to be
found in the form of half-destroyed or disused mosques that dotted the
landscape for the rest of the Soviet era.
The destruction of mosques and shrines was accompanied by atheistic
propaganda; all official proclamations and all acceptable art and literature had
to put forth an atheistic take on life. Ultimately, the significance of atheistic
propaganda lay not in its efficacy, which was little, but in the way in which it
destabilized the terms of public debate. Atheism challenged Islam not so much

16 Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia,
1917-1941 (Westport, CT: Praeger 2001), 175-87.

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at the level of individual belief but as the font of moral and ethical values that
could be held in public. Islamic values were forcefully displaced from the
public arena, and they never acquired that position again. The campaign for
atheism tapered off by the end of the 1930s, and the Union of Militant Godless
disappeared during World War II; but the “disestablishment” of Islam as the
major font of moral and ethical values for society was permanent.
The ulama had long been reviled both for being relics of a superstitious
past that had now been superseded, and for being class enemies of the
revolution and the oppressors of the toiling masses that were heroically striving
to push History to its final stage. Again, we do not have eyewitness accounts to
retrieve these atrocities from oblivion, but by the time the anti-religious
campaign slowed down in 1932, thousands of ulama had been arrested and sent
off to atone for the sins of their social origin in forced labour camps; many died
or were killed and others “fell silent.” With old-method schools and madrasas
destroyed, waqf property confiscated and redistributed, and qazi courts and the
religious boards abolished, the patterns through which Islam had been
transmitted in Central Asia were largely gone. In 1929 a country-wide law on
Religious Associations defined the scope of “religious activity” that the regime
was willing to allow in the new conditions. Religious activity could only take
place in officially recognized societies or groups of “believers,” who had to be
registered with local authorities. Religious organizations had the right to
operate places of worship, although on terms dictated by the authorities. They
were forbidden to form benevolent societies, render material support to
members, or organize study circles or camps for children or youth.17 The
assumptions about religion that underlay the law — that it was a corporate
enterprise undertaken by “believers” coming together in tangible organizations
— derived from Christianity, but were now extended in Soviet practice to all
religions.
The anti-religious campaign was curtailed only in 1941, when the onset of
war led the regime to make peace with society. Restrictions on religious
observance were eased, and in 1943 the Soviet state permitted the
establishment of a Spiritual Directorate for the Muslims of Central Asia (or
SADUM in its Russian acronym). It was a official organization, responsible to
Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, with the task of regulating religious
observance throughout the region. The purpose was as much to control
religious activity as to facilitate it, and SADUM’s position was always
ambiguous. Bureaucratic institutions such as this are alien to the Islamic
tradition, which does not recognize the authority of officially appointed figures
to make pronouncements on matters of belief or practice. SADUM’s authority
was therefore never accepted without question by Muslims, but it nevertheless

17 Ibid., 188-93.

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was able to train a small number of religious scholars and even to send some of
them overseas for higher religious education. It also issued fatwas (legal
opinions), often on demand of state authorities, to give Islamic justification to
selected Soviet policies.18 These fatwas are best seen as back-up insurance by
Soviet authorities for policies or practice they felt could be unpopular. They had
no legal standing in terms of Soviet law.
The destruction of the infrastructure of the reproduction of Islam is what
makes Muslim societies under Soviet rule different from other parts of the
Muslim world. The effects were of fundamental importance. As we shall see in
greater detail below, Soviet Islam became localized and was rendered
synonymous with tradition. With Muslim educational institutions abolished, the
ranks of the carriers of Islamic knowledge denuded, and continuity with the
past made difficult by changes in script, the family became the only site for the
transmission of Islam. At the same time, since no new religious texts could be
published, and oral chains of transmission were often destroyed, the available
religious knowledge was vastly circumscribed.

National and Civic Identities

These developments coincided with another significant phenomenon: the
emergence and consolidation of strong ethno-national identities in Central Asia.
The Soviet Union claimed to be a multinational state with a commitment to
internationalism, but it nevertheless presided over the largest project of nation-
building in human history.19 As they consolidated power in the 1920s, the
Bolsheviks were acutely aware that they bore the burden of Russia’s imperial
past. They had to overcome the distrust of the non-Russians by “indigenizing”
Soviet power. Revolutionary propaganda was most effective if conveyed to
each nation in its own language. But, ultimately, the Bolsheviks were
convinced that nations were an “objective reality” that could not be wished
away. Nationalism had also been a potent force in many parts of the country
during the civil war. It was a necessary evil that had to be dealt with. If it would
not go away, it had to be harnessed to revolutionary goals. Combined with other
concerns about overcoming backwardness and cultural revolution, this reading
of the situation led the Soviet regime to what can only be called a nation-
building project. Each nationality had to be recognized officially and granted
some degree of territorial autonomy. Giving each nation its own homeland
would curb ethnic conflict and focus everyone’s attention on the right kind of

18 See Shamsuddinxon Boboxonov, Shayx Ziyovuddinxon ibn Eshon Boboxon (ma’naviyat va

ibrat maktabi) (Tashkent: O’zbekiston Milliy Entsiklopediyasi, 2001), for the texts of certain
fatwas of SADUM.
19 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted
Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (1994): 414-52.

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conflict — that between social classes of the same nation. It would also, so
went the argument, make administration easier and more efficient. Each nation
would be equipped with education and publishing in its own language, its
bureaucracy staffed ideally by its own people, and its members aware and
proud of the “progressive” aspects of their own history. Thus would arise new
progressive cultures, “national in form, socialist in content.”
There could be a wrong kind of nationalism, of course, and the Soviets
constantly struggled against “bourgeois nationalism” — nationalism that
provided a cloak for the exploitation of one class by another. In the purges of
the 1930s, charges of nationalism proved fatal to untold thousands of
individuals. By the end of the 1930s, however, certain broad principles had
been worked out that were to provide the acceptable framework for nationality
policies until the end of the Soviet era. Nations existed and one of the
achievements of socialism was to allow them to acquire ever higher levels of
progress. The celebration of one’s nation was permissible but had to be kept
within fairly strict limits (no irredentist claims and no invocation of rivalry or
animosity toward one’s neighbours). The Russians had to be acknowledged as
the “elder brother,” whose disinterested help (in the form of leading the
revolution) had made the current happiness of the other nations possible. The
incorporation of the various non-Russian peoples into the Russian empire had
to be seen as a union, not a conquest, that allowed the Russians to play the
positive role scripted for them. Similarly, the Soviet Union was deemed to exist
on the principle of the “friendship of the peoples,” which had to be maintained
at all costs, as was the idea that the Soviet system had allowed for the resolution
of all national conflicts. All of this necessitated a great deal of mental
gymnastics and very selective, present-oriented readings of the past.
Nevertheless, none of these limits brought into question the basic premise that
every individual belonged to a nation defined by common origins, language,
history, custom, and heritage, and that each nation had a collective existence of
its own that transcended history. Nationality came to be seen as a primordial
aspect of one’s identity.20
Ideas of the nation and nationalism had arrived in Central Asia well before
the revolution of 1917, and as we have seen, were central to the worldview of
the Jadids. Although the persecution of “bourgeois” nationalism was a key
feature of the purges that decimated local elites between 1929 and 1938,

20 This provides only a very broad overview of a fascinating new literature that has reshaped our
understanding of nation-formation in the Soviet period. In addition to Yuri Slezkine’s brilliant
article cited above, see: Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism,
Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1994); Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations
and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

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ultimately, national identities in their properly Soviet form came to be

ensconced in Soviet institutions. (And once the bourgeois nationalists had been
done in, even many of their ideas crept back into official discourses of identity.)
The guardian of the national heritage was the national intelligentsia, which in
Central Asia was itself a creation of the Soviet regime. Its members found
employment in an extensive network of universities, institutes, and academies,
generously funded by the state. To be sure, nationalist chauvinism could not be
expressed in official discourse, which emphasized the “friendship of peoples,”
“Soviet internationalism,” and “the leading role of the Great Russian people,
the elder brother.” Nevertheless, in the last three decades of the Soviet period,
nationalist intelligentsias in each of the five Central Asian republics articulated
a confident national identity.

Islam Without Markets

The Soviet system under Brezhnev was defined by authoritarian politics and a
command economy, which might better be termed an “economy of distribution,”
in which the allocation of goods took place not through market forces or cash
exchange, but through bureaucratic allocation. Access to scarce goods, there-
fore, required not cash, which could be useless in itself, but connections. A
whole new social game emerged, in which informal practices came to define the
way people pursued their goals in society and economy. The so-called “shadow
economy” came about as a vast complex of private economic activity, some
legal, some not. To the extent that the jagged edges of the official economy were
smoothed by informal relations, the “shadow economy” was actually necessary.
But it all meant that the actual operation of Soviet society bore little resemblance
to the ideological slogans that everyone was obliged to mouth in public.
The golden age of the national intelligentsias was undoubtedly the “period
of mature socialism” (before it became the era of stagnation). During this
period, many union republics were effectively run by national party elites based
on political mechanisms that had little resemblance to the formal, official
rhetoric of the state. As long as republican leaders kept fulfilling their economic
obligations to the centre and kept political demands under strict control, they
were left with a great deal of leeway in running the affairs locally. For Central
Asia, it meant fulfilling its assigned role as a cotton plantation — although con-
siderable industrial growth took place, cotton monoculture dominated the
economies of all the republics, with the partial exception of Kazakhstan. On
this monoculture was built a new indigenous political class, well ensconced in
the Soviet system. Brezhnev’s rule as First Secretary of the Party coincided
with equally long spells in office by Sharaf Rashidov in Uzbekistan and
Dinmuhamed Kunaev in Kazakhstan.
Soviet power was, however, never so absolute as to supplant all local sol-
idarities with purely Soviet ones. Indeed, the lowest level of state and Party

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organizations often coincided with traditional nodes of local society. In the

cities, for instance, state and Party organizations were based on the mahalla, the
residential neighbourhood, which had long been the site of reciprocal social
bonds and of collective memory, and which continued to function as such in its
Soviet guise. In the countryside, collective farms became sites of similar net-
works of kin-based solidarities.21 Power at the ground level remained in local
hands. Party leaders, such as Rashidov and Kunaev, presided over a political
machine based on highly localized solidarity networks.
It was these solidarities that provided the base for the transmission of Islam
in Soviet Central Asia. Thus, every collective farm, it seems, had a mosque,
which was officially registered as a storage room or community hall; similarly,
the imam received a salary as a tractor driver or a mechanic. Rituals were per-
formed by men who claimed locally esteemed lineages, who transmitted the
knowledge, usually quite slender, in the family. Other forms of observance also
continued, while new forms of ritual arose to circumvent official restrictions.
Visits to tombs and shrines had long been a part of the Islamic tradition in
Central Asia; with the hajj not a possibility, they now became a common
expression of piety.22 Sufi practice was also widespread. The supervisory appa-
ratus of the state, itself not immune to these networks of solidarity, left much of
this practice alone as long as it remained discreet, and it was left to the profes-
sional propagandists of atheism to bemoan the continuing hold of religion and
tradition on the population.
If local solidarities supported Islam in the Soviet period, they also marked
it in very significant ways. While there is no question that religious observance
continued and was widespread, it was not what was most important about being
a Muslim. Rather, belonging to Islam now became a marker of national iden-
tity, for which no personal piety or observance was necessary. Islam came to be
seen as an indispensable part of national customs and traditions that served to
set Central Asians apart from outsiders. These customs and traditions included
circumcision for boys (which was frowned upon as unhealthy by Soviet med-
ical science, and hence its observance also had an aura of national opposition
to Soviet dictates), the maintenance of patriarchal kinship networks, and the
celebration of life cycle rituals. Indeed, the feasts (to’y) connected with these
rituals (but especially circumcisions and weddings) acquired a central place as
national customs in the Brezhnev period. The to’y served several purposes.
Most clearly, it marked Central Asians as different from others living in their
midst; it also served to affirm status within the national community.
Conspicuous consumption and conspicuous possession of scarce consumer

21 Olivier Roy, La nouvelle Asie centrale, ou la fabrication des nations (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
22 This phenomenon attracted the attention of Soviet ethnographers and those responsible for
anti-religious propaganda. See V. N. Basilov, Kul’t sviatykh v Islame (Moscow, 1970).

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goods were the most important ways of asserting status and influence in the
late-Soviet context,23 and the to’y was the most suitable occasion for this dis-
play. The to’y was nearly universally observed, including by members of the
Party. But these very same ceremonies were also awash in vodka, the drinking
of which became a part of national custom. Similarly, the vast majority of
Central Asians, including Communists, were buried according to Islamic ritual
in Muslim cemeteries; yet many Muslim graves were topped by busts of the
deceased in the typical Soviet style. Traditions became a central aspect of how
national identities were conceptualized in the Soviet context. But traditions are
malleable: many were invented, while others imbued with an importance they
had not previously had.
Islam was subordinated to these national identities. Central Asians were
Muslims by tradition and civilization, but they were also part of the modern
world. In the late Soviet period, being Muslim was a very important source of
identity because it served to demarcate Central Asians (or mestnye) as Muslims
from Europeans or Russians (who were deemed prishlye). The primary empha-
sis of this identity was on custom and way of life. “Islam” was understood as a
form of localism, with little or no basis in Islamic dogma or strictures.
There was nothing new about this conception of Islam as inhering in the
customs and traditions of the Muslim community. Until the advent of moder-
nity, this view was precisely how the vast majority of Muslims had understood
Islam (and the point can be made about all religious traditions). It was with the
advent of modernity that reformist movements began to separate Islam from
custom and tradition and to locate “true Islam” in scriptural sources. As schol-
ars of Muslim societies have noted, this “objectification” of Islam — the
extrication of “true Islam” from the landscape of custom and community — is
very typical of Muslim understandings of Islam in the modern age, and is itself
a product of modern understandings of religion and of the world.24 In Central
Asia, this shift was the work of Jadidism, a movement of religious and cultural
reform that sought to restore Islam to its “original purity” by stripping it of the
“encrustations of custom” through recourse to the Qur’an itself. Jadidism was
especially critical of the to’y, which it saw as wasteful, and also as unsanctioned
by Islam. It also criticized visits to shrines and tombs, and Sufi practices in gen-
eral.25 Yet the Soviet assault on Islam resulted in the practical disappearance of
this modernist and modernizing current and brought custom and tradition back
as the defining features of local understandings of Islam. What is truly para-
doxical about Soviet Islam is that the great modernizing effort of the Soviet

23 Victoria Koroteyeva and Ekaterina Makarova, “Money and Social Connections in the Soviet
and Post-Soviet Uzbek City,” Central Asian Survey 17 (1998): 579-96.
24 See, for example, Dale F. Eickelman, “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination
in Contemporary Arab Societies,” American Ethnologist 19 (1992): 643-55
25 Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 142-7.

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regime in effect de-modernized Islam. By the late Soviet period, Central Asian
understandings of Islam were more closely tied to custom and tradition than
elsewhere in the Muslim world.
But it was more than a mere return to the situation that existed before the
emergence of Jadid reform. During the Soviet period, Islam came to be a part
of the civilizational and cultural heritage of a nation imagined as an ethnic
entity. Instead of requiring the transformation of customary practices, Islam
was now synonymous with them. Moreover, Islam now existed in a radically
de-Islamized public space. The official rhetoric of the Soviet regime was
framed in terms of universal human progress, defined in entirely non-religious
terms. Religion was seen as a human construct corresponding with a certain
(primitive) stage in the development of human society. Moreover, the ideolog-
ical function of religion as the “opiate of the masses” was constantly
emphasized. Official channels of socialization, most importantly the school
system and the army, reached deeply into society. Islamic practice now took
place in an environment that was hostile to all religions.
Yet, for all that, Soviet Islam was politically quiescent. Although Central
Asians were quite conscious of their Muslim identity, that identity was not
“pan-Islamic”: Muslims from other parts of the world who did not share Central
Asian customs were not included in these boundaries of “Muslimness.”26
Indeed, the rhetoric of Muslimness did not exclude the possibility of antago-
nism with other peoples of Central Asia, let alone with Muslims abroad. While
Muslimness distinguished locals from outsiders in the Soviet context, most
Central Asians did not see being Muslim as counterposed to being Soviet. The
Soviet government presented Tashkent as a show piece to the Third World,
especially the Muslim world, of Soviet achievements in overcoming underde-
velopment. It was a common destination for large numbers of foreign students,
many of them Muslim. Yet there was little love lost between them and their
hosts precisely because their common Muslimness meant little to the hosts.
Indeed, most Central Asians took great pride in being citizens of a super-
power, and of a state that stood against colonialism and oppression. Soviet
patriotism was shaped by a number of powerful tools of socialization, foremost
of which was universal education, achieved in the post-War decades, which
shaped civic attitudes. For men, mandatory military service provided a further
storehouse of common experiences shared with men from across the length and
breadth of the country. There was also an undeniable pride in being citizens of a
superpower. When they travelled abroad or interacted with foreigners, Central
Asians did so as proud citizens of a superpower who were more “advanced” than

26 John Schoeberlein-Engel, “Identity in Central Asia: Construction and Contention in the

Conceptions of ‘Özbek,’ ‘Tâjik,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Samarqandi,’ and Other Groups” (PhD diss.,
Harvard University, 1994), 222-44.

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their brethren in the Third World. The Soviet government showcased Central
Asia, especially Tashkent, as models of development bypassing capitalism.
Central Asians may not have been posted to European parts of the Soviet Union,
but they were routinely appointed to diplomatic posts abroad, especially in the
Muslim world, where many Central Asians served as ambassadors. Central
Asians also served willingly in the Soviet armed forces. Although a glass ceil-
ing kept Central Asians under-represented in the officer ranks, Central Asians
served no more and no less willingly in the armed forces than any other Soviet
citizens. They went as military advisors to foreign countries, especially in the
Muslim world, and they fought in Afghanistan in large numbers.

THE SOVIET CASE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The Management of Islam
Although, historically, Islamic institutions have existed outside the control of
the state, the situation has changed in the modern era. Modern states have
commonly sought to reshape Islam, to institute bureaucratic controls over it,
and to “put it to work” for the purposes of garnering legitimacy and creating
new forms of public morality.27 These attempts have varied in intensity,
depending on historical peculiarities as well as the strength of the various states
involved; but nowhere is Islam unaffected by the reach of the modern state. The
Soviet case is thus far from unique, but it is unique in the intensity of the state’s
assault on Islam and the longevity of the regime.
In the 1920s Atatürk enacted a number of reforms that transformed Turkish
culture in ways parallel to the cultural revolution in Soviet Central Asia in the
same decade. He did not launch an all-out assault on Islam, but he did subjugate
Islamic institutions to the state. Atatürk abolished Sufi orders, broke the
connection between the shariat and civil law by enacting new civil and penal
codes borrowed whole cloth from European models, and revoked all privileges
enjoyed by the ulama. Atatürk also regularly inveighed against “primitive”
religious practices which, he thought, ought to have no place in an enlightened
state. Islam, however, did not disappear from the public or from state education
in Turkey: in an approved and properly “nationalized” form it continues to be
the basis of the moral education of all pupils.28
In less radical forms, states in Egypt, Malaysia, and Indonesia have sought
to shape or reshape Islam, Islamic education, and even observance. Weaker
states, such as those in Pakistan and Bangladesh, have been much less
successful in “nationalizing” Islam. The harshest repression of Islam has come
27 Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in
Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).
28 Samuel Kaplan, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in
Post-1980 Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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from socialist regimes which sought to bring about large-scale transformation

of society and culture — China during the cultural revolution and Albania
under Enver Hoxha, which declared itself the world’s only atheistic state in
1967, are the most striking examples. In both these cases, however, the period
of state persecution Islam was shorter than the six decades of Soviet history.
Finally, the Soviet attempt to bureaucratize Islam through SADUM (and its
counterparts for European Russia, Northern Caucasus, and Transcaucasia) is
not unique. The model for SADUM was the Spiritual Assembly established in
Ufa by Catherine II for Tatar and Bashkir Muslims in 1782. At that time, the
Spiritual Assembly was unprecedented as a bureaucratic institution for Islam.
The Hapsburgs organized Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina along similar lines after
they occupied the region in 1878, and similar institutions arose in all countries
of south-eastern Europe with a Muslim population in the early twentieth
century.29 Since then the practice has been adopted in many Muslim-majority
countries. The new Turkish republic made all Islamic religious . activity subject
to the supervision of a directorate of religious affairs (Diyanet I şleri Bakanl1ğ1),
whose task was to regulate religious observance and education throughout the
country. Imams thus became government functionaries and mosques came
under the control of the state. Moreover, the directorate has the right to
adjudicate on questions of orthodoxy and heresy. Turkey, thus, also came to
have an “official Islam,” complete with a bureaucratic structure. The
government of France created a French Council of the Muslim Faith in 2003 to
be “the French Government’s official interlocutor on Muslim affairs.”30

Nationality Without a Nation-State

Beyond the confines of the Soviet Union, the central feature of Muslim life in
the twentieth century was the advent of the territorial nation-state as the seat of
legitimacy and sovereignty, and the node of solidarity and loyalty. The
experience of Soviet Muslims differed in many ways here. They certainly
experienced the state — indeed, they experienced it in a more ruthless form
than any other group of Muslims — and they were no strangers to discourses
of ethnic nationality. But they existed in a state that saw itself as a multinational
federation. The state was quite successful in creating ties of loyalty among its
citizens, including the Muslims. For Soviet Muslims, the nation and the state
coexisted, quite peacefully, but they represented different poles of identity.
Soviet Central Asians had nationalities without a nation-state.
As we have seen, the idea of nationality had arrived in Central Asia before
the revolution and had been enthusiastically embraced by a small group of

29 Alexandre Popovic, L’Islam balkanique: Les musulmans du sud-est européen dans le période
post-ottomane (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986).
30 <http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Islam-in-France.html>, (viewed 19 January 2008).

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modernist intellectuals. It was Soviet nationalities policies and practices,

however, that made nationality real for the people of Central Asia. One’s
nationality was listed on one’s identity documents; it rendered one eligible or
ineligible for jobs and other scarce resources; and it placed one in various social
and political hierarchies in the Soviet state. Late-Soviet conceptions of
nationality harked back to Romantic notions language, common descent
through history, and attachment to specific territories. In this respect, Central
Asians were thoroughly “nationalized” — belonging to a nationality defined in
organic terms became part of the common sense of late-Soviet life, so that
visitors were always asked who they really were “by nationality,” and answers
such as “Canadian,” “American,” or “Pakistani” did not suffice. But nationality
was quite distinct from citizenship, which pertained to the Soviet Union. The
constituent republics of the Soviet Union were all named after different national
groups and were supposed to be homelands for each group. But they were not
expected to exercise sovereignty on behalf of the “titular” nationality; in any
case, in practice, the republics had little political leeway. The Soviet Union was
highly centralized in terms of economic policy, with the republics having little
say in deciding on allocations. The republics had flags and parliaments, but
were not actors on the world stage.
Central Asians lived in a Muslim-majority region of a state that was neither
Muslim-majority nor had much concern with Islam. Central Asian cities had
large, in some cases preponderant, presences of Europeans, although in the late
Soviet period, political power at the republic level was in Muslim hands. Soviet
Central Asians experienced more thorough state- and nation-building projects
than almost any other Muslim-majority population in the world, but they did
not experience life in a nation-state — as the juridical seat of national
sovereignty and an actor in the world at large. Rather, Central Asian political
elites acted as national leaders within the circumscribed parameters of a Soviet
world with its own economy and its own constraints. The constituent republics
of the Soviet Union were, however, nation-states manqués in a way and once
the union ceased to exist, they have all sought to transform themselves into full
fledged nation-states, with explicitly defined policies of nationalizing the
states.31 But Central Asians missed out on the odyssey of hope and ambition
attached to nation-states elsewhere in the world.

De-Islamization of Public Life and Islam as Nationality

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Soviet modernization in Central Asia is the
drastic de-Islamization of public life. Many states have put Islam to use and

31 I use “nationalizing the state” in the sense invoked by Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism
Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).

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created political spaces closed to the authority of Islam. But few went as far as
the Soviet Union in subverting even the purely moral authority of Islamic
sanctions. Law in Soviet Central Asia ceased to have any connection with the
shari’a in the mid-1920s, and the situation has not changed. In post-Soviet
Central Asia, these institutional continuities with the Soviet past remain very
strong, and ensure that the post-Soviet states operate outside the discursive field
of Islam.
The de-Islamization of public life did not, as we have seen, make Islam
disappear from Central Asia, but rather, imparted it meanings peculiar to the
Soviet context. It became a communal identity, but with little or no regard for
the behavioural injunctions of the Islamic tradition. We see parallels elsewhere
in the Muslim world of such “Muslim” identities — Lebanon and Bosnia come
to mind most readily, but even the Turkish republic emerged as a homeland for
the non-Arab Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, before the Turkish identity was
thoroughly ethnicized.32 Nevertheless, such Muslim identities have become
rare since the rise of Islam as a political force in the last three decades. Central
Asia missed the whole wave of Islamist political movements, and even after
15 years of independence, Islamism finds little fertile ground in the region.33
We can therefore still find in Central Asia ways of being Muslim that are
increasingly rare elsewhere in the Muslim world.
***
ADEEB KHALID is professor of history at Carleton College in Northfield,
Minnesota. A graduate of McGill University, he did his doctoral work at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Muslim
Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press,
1998), Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia
(University of California Press, 2007), and numerous articles on the cultural
and political history of Central Asia since the Russian conquest.

ADEEB KHALID est professeur d’histoire au Carleton College à Northfield,

au Minnesota. Diplômé de l’Université McGill, il a fait son travail de doctorat
à l’Université de Wisconsin-Madison. Il est l’auteur de The Politics of Muslim
Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press,
1998), Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia
(University of California Press, 2007) et de nombreux articles sur l’histoire cul-
turelle et politique de l’Asie centrale depuis la conquête russe.

32 Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk?
(London: Routledge, 2006).
33 I have argued this point further in Khalid, Islam after Communism, especially, chapter 6.

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